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7.55M
464b3da8-ede1-4723-a0e3-f1c37b5336bd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
20000 UC Berkeley lectures that were deleted from Youtube
1f466f55-bb42-4e01-89c2-0a6dce71d8b3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Structure of the Pain of Change If there's something in your life that isn't quite good enough and you'd like to change it, chances are you can't just swap one thing for another directly. There are many reasons for that, but this post won’t focus on the various obstacles or how to overcome them. Instead, we'll try...
e58d2688-eabb-4f14-9edd-89ff343ca0b5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Toy Models and Tegum Products (Thanks to Adam Scherlis, Kshitij Sachan, Buck Shlegeris, Chris Olah, and Nicholas Schiefer for conversations that informed this post. Thanks to Aryan Bhatt for catching an error in the loss minimization.) Anthropic recently published a paper on toy models of superposition [Elhage+22]. O...
3cc4c70c-46c4-4826-bf14-ac978a466c78
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Review of AI Alignment Progress I'm having trouble keeping track of everything I've learned about AI and AI alignment in the past year or so. I'm writing this post in part to organize my thoughts, and to a lesser extent I'm hoping for feedback about what important new developments I've been neglecting. I'm sure that I...
d545acfe-affa-4a29-9752-b76953eb1790
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Long-form data bottlenecks might stall AI progress for years  Cross-posted from my Substack.  Introduction AI 2027’s recent publication made waves—if you’re reading this, you probably saw the whole saga unfold: cheers, jeers, NYT writeup, the works. To briefly recap: the authors predict that by March 2027, a superhu...
4ee9dbcf-54fa-4a64-81e4-6dc72f06e2fd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI safety logo design contest, due mid-May Please have a look at the updated version of this post on the EA Forum. This contest is about creating a logo to represent AI safety research.  I’m being supported by an independent funder and people from nonlinear.org and am taking care of administration and communication....
c2da4bea-17e1-4a01-a2b1-6ad6d91fbb9c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Ban development of unpredictable powerful models? In this post, I propose a (relatively strict) prediction-based eval which is well-defined, which seems to rule out lots of accident risk, and which seems to partially align industry incentives with real alignment progress. This idea is not ready to be implemented, but ...
180ecd43-a66b-4354-a172-b5aa82ecd382
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Why Does Deep and Cheap Learning Work So Well? J Stat Phys DOI 10.1007/s10955-017-1836-5 Why Does Deep and Cheap Learning Work So Well? Henry W. Lin1·Max Tegmark2·David Rolnick3 Received: 3 December 2016 / Accepted: 27 June 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Abstract We show how the success of deep learn...
c151fbf5-71b5-4c33-93b8-e09794184128
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When do "brains beat brawn" in Chess? An experiment As a kid, I really enjoyed chess, as did my dad. Naturally, I wanted to play him. The problem was that my dad was extremely good. He was playing local tournaments and could play blindfolded, while I was, well, a child. In a purely skill based game like chess, an extr...
a4ac8e80-f71f-4fa6-8289-7152a32a08ed
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program 2022 The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative ([SERI](https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/stanford-existential-risks-initiative/content/stanford-existential-risks-initiative)) recently opened [applications](https://airtable.com/shr3XO3xZVR9HNPS2) for the second iteration of the [M...
7258c054-2725-479d-8289-3664fd623828
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Non-standard cryo ideas What plans could a prospective cryonicist try out, beyond simply signing up, that could increase the odds of eventually having a pleasant re-animation experience? To show what I mean, here are the main ideas I've managed to come up with so far. None of these particular ideas are a standard par...
25cd92b0-e56a-4b80-ac52-83e47b4b4b34
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Madison Monday Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup WHEN: 12 March 2012 05:30:00PM (-0600) WHERE: 1831 Monroe St., Madison, WI This time around, let's see if we can find ways to be more "strategic", as in: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/ I'd ...
a6a84b58-6169-4d8b-97aa-2f941c0d431e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Communicating via writing vs. in person There's a lot that I really like about communicating via writing. Communicating in person is sometimes frustrating for me, and communicating via writing addresses a lot of those frustrations: 1) I often want to make a point that depends on the other person knowing X. In person,...
7c873033-5d40-46da-93d4-7cc8cba0f871
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Formalizing the Problem of Side Effect Regularization 1 Introduction --------------- We need to build *aligned* ai systems, not just capable ai systems. For example, recommender systems which maximize app usage might provoke addiction in their users. Users need the ai system’s behavior to be aligned with their inte...
c78d81fe-dc4f-42f7-8a16-903d46f0e1c1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to learn a new area X that you have no idea about. This guide is in response to a request in the open thread.  I would like to improve it; If you have some improvement to contribute I would be delighted to hear it!  I hope it helps.  It was meant to be a written down form of; "wait-stop-think" before approaching a...
4a8e960f-5b75-4a0a-90e6-00cef4b7fb50
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Where Am I?", by Daniel Dennett ”Where Am I?” is a short story by Daniel Dennett from his book Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Some of you might already be familiar with it. The story is a humorous semi-science fiction one, where Dennett gets a job offer form Pentagon that entails moving h...
2af4da7f-ea18-4300-b932-117e65f07f42
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI development is an act of social revolution Assume the goal of AI research is to build superintelligent decision-making systems. If we successfully develop and deploy such systems, it will likely no longer make sense for humans to work many, or even most, jobs. The duties humans must still perform will radically di...
d1e28a98-3d15-45b0-97a6-44847e7ad7bd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
February 2012 Media Thread There was a recent discussion considering the idea of a monthly Book (later expanded to movies, links, etc) thread. The poll was pretty unanimous (Both before and after I was karmassassinated) that this was A Good Idea (tm), and daenerys's Janurary thread (from which I obviously stole a lot ...
af9b0782-9218-4899-a41e-638d237aba32
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Quantifying Harm 1 Introduction --------------- AI systems are playing an ever-expanding role in making decisions, in applications ranging from hiring and interviewing to healthcare to autonomous vehicles. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is leading to increasing scrutiny of the harm and benefit caused by (the decisi...
6910eb00-3e91-4aa9-ba78-dba22dd31679
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
$1,000 Bounty for Pro-BLM Policy Analysis I want to know what Americans with no particular relevant expertise should do in order to achieve the policy goals of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. I'm offering a $1,000 bounty (payable directly to you or to a charity of your choice) to whoever provides...
6814af06-ad9e-46a7-bf86-19b18461b87c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Delta variant: we should probably be re-masking Like you, I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It first appeared when vaccines started rolling out a few months back, and got brighter when my family got their vaccine cards signed. It got still brighter as I signed up for my first dose (#ModernaManiacs), ...
9ac2c24a-6577-4782-a082-ca06bd28c036
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
In praise of contributing examples, analogies and lingo Examples, analogies and lingo all make posts easier to understand. So then, I want to encourage people to write more comments like: * X is an example of what you're describing. * Y might be a good analogy for this. * Z could be a good term for that. I see co...
a5d735ea-96b8-469f-98c8-3a86c59adc6e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Stampy's AI Safety Info - New Distillations #4 [July 2023] Hey! This is another update from the distillers at [AI Safety Info.](https://aisafety.info/) ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/EELddDmBknLyjwgbu/pvqp2geuw04y2yhsbwmn)Here are a couple of the answers that...
c2dc756c-0cef-4067-8382-54f1e4e51773
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games WHEN: 17 August 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 1390 Market St. San Francisco We'll be meeting to hang out and play board games at my apartment (our normal place doesn't reliably have tables). Please ...
267830ee-8634-49db-9613-15b0e4772d76
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Brussels monthly meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels monthly meetup WHEN: 14 September 2013 01:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles Brussels meetups now happen every month on the second Saturday of the month (even when we forget to announce them in time...). We are once...
3d7684f8-7e25-4f15-b6f1-84c4d4049790
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Indifference and compensatory rewards Crossposted at the Intelligent Agents Forum It's occurred to me that there is a framework where we can see all "indifference" results as corrective rewards, both for the utility function change indifference and for the policy change indifference. Imagine that the agent has rewar...
82ccef7d-552c-4274-a8a3-330f77e3e1d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Community norms poll (2 mins) A poll about what community norms should be in light of the nonlinear saga. Trying to be forward-looking rather than going back over events. Votes are anonymous (though given an alphanumeric string so all your votes are connected) Consider in regard to what you want rationalist norms to ...
7d80f396-1f99-4744-8619-f3e4bd2513e3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A taxonomy of non-schemer models (Section 1.2 of “Scheming AIs”) This is Section 1.2 of my report “Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?”. There’s also a summary of the full report here (audio here). The summary covers most of the main points and technical terms, and I’m hoping t...
0c3d1036-5834-48ea-bc91-321d696ce72f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Publication decisions for large language models, and their impacts This post is one part of the sequence Understanding the diffusion of large language models.  As context for this post, I strongly recommend reading at least the 5-minute summary of the sequence. In this post, I: 1. Overview the different forms of in...
08d14636-fa21-4750-b98d-610ba390588d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
AI Safety Hub Serbia Soft Launch TLDR; We got three-month funding from a generous individual funder to launch an AI Safety office in Serbia. We are giving free office space (and, if funding later permits, housing) to AI Safety researchers who are looking for a place to work from. Priority for citizens of countries lik...
1f84902e-08e4-4bdf-97bc-97e49dd5cce9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Anthropically Blind: the anthropic shadow is reflectively inconsistent For the purposes of this post, the anthropic shadow is the type of inference found in How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?. > "Anthropic principle! If the LHC had worked, it would have produced a black hole or strangelet or vacuum failure, and we wo...
16801386-c4a0-4805-8004-18a69574b5c0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
UAP and Global Catastrophic Risks DoD has confirmed yesterday the authenticity of UAP videos and Yudkowsky made a bet: “So apparently there’s some kind of thing right now about supposed aliens. I haven’t looked into it at all, but I am happy to blindly bet against anything to do with visible intelligent aliens at 100:...
789c5655-ea56-47fd-87cb-9572d6ca6a25
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Comment section from 05/19/2019 I moved the big meta-level comment thread from "Yes Requires the Possibility of No" over to here, since it seemed mostly unrelated to that top-level post. This not being on frontpage also makes it easier for people to just directly discuss the moderation and meta-level norms.
b934aa06-92e0-43df-af6a-aea561cf2817
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[link] Anger as antidote to Confirmation Bias Abstract: > The current research explores the effect of anger on hypothesis confirmation — the propensity to seek information that confirms rather than disconfirms one’s opinion. We argue that the moving against action tendency associated with anger leads angry individua...
bf44e41b-6fed-48fe-b006-43f7bef0e5bb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is it true that most studies in Kahneman's 'Thinking fast and slow' are not replicable and the book is largely not supported by evidence? So I stumbled on this article. https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow 'So, replicability [of all studies in this book] i...
0a49e18e-14fb-4605-a28e-1604671f7ed3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Research agenda for AI safety and a better civilization This agenda is various ideas that occurred to me throughout the years of reading up on AI progress and AI safety. One big idea is that AI is simultaneously software, applied mathematics as well as philosophy and ideology. AI being philosophy and ideology means th...
b40fc9ea-01c0-43a7-9b2b-496c85d41a2c
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"(Part 6 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide") Today was the day. The streets of ancient Earth were crowded to overbursting with people looking up at the sky, faces crowded up against windows. Waiting for their sorrows to end. Akon was looking down at their faces, from the balcony of a room in a well-guarded hotel. There wer...
8d1a653a-b4d0-41a2-9260-7a4159cdfe2f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My Most Likely Reason to Die Young is AI X-Risk Introduction One of my pet peeves is people calling AI Safety a longtermist cause area. It is entirely reasonable to consider AI Safety a high priority cause area without putting significant value on future generations, let alone buying things like total utilitarianism o...
ab642f8e-73be-490d-9e6e-e232f21b7161
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Should the front page include the phrase "latest insights"? The front page claims <blockquote>We use the latest insights from cognitive science, social psychology,probability theory, and decision theory to improve our understanding of how the world works and what we can do to achieve our goals.</blockquote>   I fin...
0c946f1c-cc61-491d-892f-3b4569b7a85c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
OpenAI's Preparedness Framework: Praise & Recommendations In this post, I summarize some of my thoughts on OpenAI's recent preparedness framework. The post focuses on my opinions/analysis of the framework, and it doesn't have much summary (for readers unfamiliar with the framework, I recommend Zvi’s post).  As a high...
cfc04488-d084-4135-8510-82b88a8ac85b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
I Would Have Solved Alignment, But I Was Worried That Would Advance Timelines The alignment community is ostensibly a group of people concerned about AI risk. Lately, it would be more accurate to describe it as a group of people concerned about AI timelines. AI timelines have some relation to AI risk. Slower timeline...
847bfcce-f2c4-48f0-bd15-3c87d944c336
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31 This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for January 16-31.   > It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like: > > * Established a useful new habit > * Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about so...
78f1a66f-8afb-4e5a-a1f7-5f59bb1968c9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Linkpost] The AGI Show podcast This is a linkpost for www.theagishow.com. Also on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@theagishow. Hey everyone, my name is Soroush and I work full-time on AGI alignment. As part of my work in alignment, I've started a podcast, The AGI Show, to help discuss and promote the best and mo...
aa101ec8-cae6-4570-8a87-68d995f9e75f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Is there any policy for a fair treatment of AIs whose friendliness is in doubt? A game theory question. If there ever exists a roughly-human-level agenty AI who could grow to overpower humans but who humans have an opportunity to stop because takeoff is slow enough. Assume the AI could coexist with humanity but fears...
45fc7e1d-d2dd-468e-8130-9a394f36c0da
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Don't Count Your Chickens... A blog post by Derek Sivers links to evidence that stating one's goals makes one less likely to accomplish them. Excerpt: > Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you're less motivated to do the hard work needed. Link: Shut up! Announcing your plan...
9139c980-7d15-4d1e-9a29-eea4906b80c1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A City Within a City My local gym is surrounded on all four sides by tent cities. At first I was nervous to walk there after work, but soon I got used to the tents and their residents. When I’m passing through on my way to the gym, I feel like I’m traveling from Rome to the Vatican—a city within a city. They have ar...
afb167b4-fcef-41be-9592-f43a19c95bec
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Many, many, many are the flaws in human reasoning which lead us to overestimate how well our beloved theory explains the facts. The phlogiston theory of chemistry could explain just about anything, so long as it didn’t have to predict it in advance. And the more phenomena you use your favored theory to explain, the tr...
f9783511-0860-45a3-8414-c7163cdf1a30
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Why MIRI? I wrote a short profile of MIRI for a forthcoming book on [effective altruism](http://lesswrong.com/lw/hx4/four_focus_areas_of_effective_altruism/). It leaves out [many important details](http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199678112.do), but hits many of the key points pretty succinctly: > The [Machin...
46f27cba-0d60-4d9c-a99f-c54832fb305f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Series of absurd upgrades in nature's great search So you want to find that special thing that replicates best and lasts longest? Just vibrate a bunch of molecules a long time! You might reasonably assume that molecules wouldn't practically ever randomly assemble themselves into anything worth looking at. It happens...
8e2456cc-59a8-4321-99e0-ea5e988a64a1
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Slowing down AI progress is an underexplored alignment strategy The emotional burden of watching the world end ============================================== My current beliefs about AI timelines have made my life significantly worse. I find thoughts about the ever-shrinking timeline to AGI invading nearly every aspe...
8b668070-bc48-4a70-b474-cd26f6c652c5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Maybe you want to maximise paperclips too As most LWers will know, Clippy the Paperclip Maximiser is a superintelligence who wants to tile the universe with paperclips. The LessWrong wiki entry for Paperclip Maximizer says that: > The goal of maximizing paperclips is chosen for illustrative purposes because it is ver...
012257b2-d1bf-4dc2-81f2-d56289087594
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Extreme Rationality: It Could Be Great Reply to: Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great I considered making this into a comment on Yvain's last post, but I'd like to redirect the discussion slightly. Yvain's warning is important, but we're left with the question of how to turn the current state of the art in ration...
8ff10fe4-7647-4b5e-963a-550e15cf4858
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Information throughput of biological humans and frontier LLMs Biological humans appear, across many domains, to have have an information throughput of at most about 50 bits per second. Naively multiplying this by the number of humans gives an upper bound of about 500 gigabits per second when considering the informatio...
eac26797-d46b-4c5d-8a27-d49cb75ce7cc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Importance of Mathematics (Gowers) For the past few days I've been pondering the question of how best to respond to paulfchristiano's recent posts and comments questioning the value of mathematical research. I don't think I can do it concisely, in a single post; bridging the inferential distance may require someth...
3b84d9f2-53f1-431a-99a0-238d6b45a99c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Self Service Roundup Follow-up to: Full Service Before moving on to other topics, I thought I would round out my thoughts on self/full service itself (for some good follow-up on the drugstores, see the comments of the previous post) about the History of Self-Service, which I found fit my model of such things quite we...
ac8d6da9-0d6c-4884-a12a-6da0912f6b49
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
[AN #55] Regulatory markets and international standards as a means of ensuring beneficial AI Find all Alignment Newsletter resources [here](http://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/). In particular, you can [sign up](http://eepurl.com/dqMSZj), or look through this [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/...
e122845b-4051-4f3a-befb-a1359f6b61d3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Specific versus General Principles for Constitutional AI 1 Introduction --------------- The method of Constitutional AI (CAI) [[1](#bib.bib1)] makes it possible to train a harmless AI assistant via self-improvement, without requiring any human supervision to identify harmful outputs. It generalizes Reinforcement Le...
2715564d-a9c3-444b-90d5-7471c301b3a2
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"There has been considerable debate over whether development in AI will experience a discontinuity, or whether it will follow a more continuous growth curve. Given the lack of consensus and the confusing, diverse terminology, it is natural to hypothesize that much of the debate is due to simple misunderstandings. Here,...
a807455f-471a-40a3-bb89-31571c2cb1fe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help > Most witches don't believe in gods.  They know that the gods exist, of course.  They even deal with them occasionally.  But they don't believe in them.  They know them too well.  It would be like believing in the postman. >         —Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad Once upon a t...
459162ca-0c00-4bd0-9288-21ed6d4ab8c3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Guide to Rational Investing Hello Less Wrong, I don't post here much but I've been involved in the Bay Area Less Wrong community for several years, where many of you know me from. The following is a white paper I wrote earlier this year for my firm, RHS Financial, a San Francisco based private wealth management prac...
fe94364a-5b06-4cda-98cf-2e0a02dc02ed
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Happiness Logging: One Year In I've been logging my happiness for a year now. [1] My phone notifies me at unpredictable intervals, and I respond with some tags. For example, if it pinged me now, I would enter "6 home bed computer blog". I always have a numeric tag for my current happiness, and then additional tags for...
32429285-95c9-42d3-9303-488aa7c06a1f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Enhanced Clarity to Bridge the AI Labeling Gap? I’ve noticed a lot of conversations here about AI safety and whether an AI can have a certain “mindset” based on how it’s trained or programmed. It’s a fascinating topic, but it can also be confusing.  Especially for the people with no familiarity with AI. One idea that...
e3dba83a-621d-4a04-a2b3-78a7be17223c
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"When I'm learning a new skill, there's a technique I often use to quickly gain the basics of the new skill without getting drowned in the plethora of resources that exist. I've found that just 3 resources that cover the skill from 3 separate viewpoints(along with either daily practice or a project) is enough to quickl...
56899333-72d7-4f0f-8349-a322514e326e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Article Review: Discovering Latent Knowledge (Burns, Ye, et al) [This is a cross-post from my blog at aizi.substack.com.] Large Language Models are hell-demons summoned from the data dimension. You feed a giant machine approximately everything ever written, and suddenly it can have a conversation, run a virtual machi...
c140a1c6-23f9-40eb-801c-d371dea71f1a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Criticism of some popular LW articles My composition teacher in college told me that in some pottery schools, the teacher holds up your pot, examines it, comments on it, and then smashes it on the floor. They do this for your first 100 pots. In that spirit, this post's epistemic status is SMASH THIS POT. As an exper...
0dbcdb02-897e-4ee9-8f71-ec867b25d356
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Decoherence Previously in series:  Feynman Paths To understand the quantum process called "decoherence", we first need to look at how the special case of quantum independence can be destroyed—how the evolution of a quantum system can produce entanglement where there was formerly independence. Quantum independence,...
3b325f97-1cf7-4d8b-9bfb-d4e5ea1df3c4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can we “cure” cancer? In an excellent recent essay on “big visions for biology,” Sam Rodriques writes: > Ask most biologists about the cure for cancer, and they will tell you it doesn’t exist: cancer is many diseases that are mostly unrelated to each other, and that all have to be cured one at a time. Are “most biol...
004a2225-8c5b-4524-86c5-a53fb42c7719
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Help me to understand AI alignment! As will be very clear from my post, I'm not a computer scientist. However, I am reasonably intelligent and would like to improve my understanding of AI risk. As I understand it (please do let me know if I've got this wrong), the risk is that: * an AGI could rapidly become many tim...
fabdb828-f70f-49c6-b219-5ece9122a059
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Road to Mazedom Previous post: How Escape From Immoral Mazes Sequence begins here: Moloch Hasn’t Won The previous posts mostly took mazes as given.  As an individual, one’s ability to fight any large system is limited.  That does not mean our individual decisions do not matter. They do matter. They add up.  M...
d1c58f84-4cec-4ec4-8f3b-22414514e8be
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour
684e0ad6-2733-4053-a3d3-a5a225dcf2a0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity WHEN: 13 November 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the ...
ee85f131-87d6-4d45-aeb9-cab91a4c600e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A concise definition of what it means to win A concise definition of what it means to win[1] Amor vincit omnia What does it mean for AI alignment to have “gone well”? Many answers have been proposed, but here is mine. A few basic requirements: * We don’t all die immediately, or in a few months, or a few years (the...
05053979-8743-49a1-a58a-131a1ace1c6b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Introduction to Pragmatic AI Safety [Pragmatic AI Safety #1] This is the introduction to a sequence of posts that describe our models for Pragmatic AI Safety. Thanks to Oliver Zhang, Mantas Mazeika, Scott Emmons, Neel Nanda, Cameron Berg, Michael Chen, Vael Gates, Joe Kwon, Jacob Steinhardt, Steven Basart, and Jacob H...
9c5deaa5-8d5c-40b7-bec2-93513cd51db1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Math: Textbooks and the DTP pipeline Epistemic status: Half-certain, half-skeptical. This mental model feels a bit too compressed to me to be maximally useful. I've spent a surprising (=non-zero) number of hours studying mathematics during my summer break, and noticed an interesting pattern in undergraduate textbooks...
80b97a96-b491-4d10-8dba-88b5da4e0a57
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Narcissism vs. social signalling The main thrust of Robin Hanson's work is that so much of human behaviour is the result of social signalling; that is, the attempt to convince others that we possess good qualities. On the other hand, The Last Psychiatrist presents narcissism as an alternative theory; that is, much of ...
97627de0-0a98-4364-8a4f-16abe4b86391
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post925 Summary: Many proposed AGI alignment procedures involve taking a pretrained model and training it using rewards from an oversight process to get a policy . These procedures might fail when the oversight procedure is locally inadequate: that is, if the model is able to trick the oversight process into givin...
a20cc732-c8e3-4ac6-9fc5-7027c1ca7f54
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A physicist's approach to Origins of Life Note: this is cross-posted from the post here, where I had a few videos that I could not add in here - see the original post for the full experience I spent the 6 years in my Ph.D. thinking of the broad topic of origins of life, or “abiogenesis”: how does non-living matter tu...
54bd00da-e240-4665-9d9f-fc5191d68dfe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Upcoming Protest for AI Safety The PauseAI movement is planning protests for Friday, February 28th in several American metropolitan areas. I understand some people's reservations about protests causing the public to develop negative associations with AI safety. In response, I invite them to join us as a way of direct...
5c7e1ad9-033c-4e21-b16e-32643c9ec796
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does there exist an AGI-level parameter setting for modern DRL architectures? Suppose the architecture includes memory (in the form of a recurrent state) and will act as the policy network for an observation-based RL agent. Evaluating the agent from a reasonable initial state, would you guess that there exists a model...
e609cc7d-bb26-4f3f-9310-e6cc24eb855a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
White House submissions and report on AI safety In May, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) [announced](https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/03/preparing-future-artificial-intelligence) “a new series of workshops and an interagency working group to learn more about the benefits and risks ...
26f25cba-4d50-4440-80f4-a50ec68a82f3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Outperforming the human Atari benchmark I haven't paid much attention to Atari in a long time, and so would appreciate takes from anyone who follows this more closely. My take: A single architecture that can handle both the games that require significant exploration, and the games that require long-term credit assign...
2a8f0c0f-4d9b-4e59-be11-0151079d2018
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
List #3: Why not to assume on prior that AGI-alignment workarounds are available   A friend in technical AI Safety shared a list of cruxes for their next career step.  One premise implicit in their writing was that a long-term safe AGI can be build in the first place (or that we should resolve to build safe AGI, ...
3c1c0ac0-9e47-4f49-aa16-c270a2a9e830
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Join and meet: Examples A union of sets and the least common multiple of a set of natural numbers can both be viewed as joins. In addition, joins can be useful to the designers of statically typed programming languages. %%%knows-requisite([https://arbital.com/p/3v1](https://arbital.com/p/3v1)): The real numbers -----...
5efc6dc7-cccf-4cab-bb12-67a9cf5c1e3a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams A huge thanks to @Agustín Covarrubias 🔸  for his feedback and support on the following article: ---------------------------------------- Shapley values are an extremely popular tool in both economics and explainable AI. In this article, we use the concept of “synergy...
05c2f40d-063a-44df-ba72-a8974736607c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid 11/12: The Winds of Winter Spoiler Alert below the fold, can’t be helped. We have perhaps the best possible news. Pfizer’s vaccine is over 90% effective, and they are going to ask for emergency use authorization in a few weeks. Woo-hoo! We also have very bad news. It was clear the numbers were going to get wor...
8b6e0a7c-fcb5-422d-b5b3-22f442e77624
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Demanding and Designing Aligned Cognitive Architectures This post is to announce my new paper Demanding and Designing Aligned Cognitive Architectures, which I recently presented in the PERLS workshop (Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning)] at NeurIPS 2021. In this post, I will give a brief overview of the pape...
02c04580-e096-44f6-a464-97adcea1e480
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to train your transformer In this blogpost I describe a transformer project, how I proceeded, the results, the pitfalls and more. At the end of the post I will repeat all salient points in a TL;DR, so if you are short of time, just skip ahead.  I originally published this on a company blog. The blog has been dow...
62705df7-75d2-4e6a-a2c3-cd2935112502
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Social choice ethics in artificial intelligence ORIGINAL ARTICLE Social choice ethics in artificial intelligence Seth D. Baum1 Received: 17 July 2016 / Accepted: 16 September 2017 /C211Springer-Verlag London Ltd. 2017 Abstract A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is to use social choice, in whi...
c580ab7b-70a1-4f42-8b9e-a572458fe63a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Outcomes of the Geopolitical Singularity We will soon enter an unstable state where the balance of military and political power will shift significantly because of advanced AI. As different nations gain access to new advanced technologies, nations that have a relative lead will amass huge power over those that are le...
8e8fc106-9bee-4579-9ddb-41c5963b5f44
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Predictions for GPT-N Regarding GPT-3, there is some discussion whether growing the model would transform it into an Oracle AI. I looked into the actual benchmark results (Appendix H in the paper) to see if we can predict something useful from the actual measurements. Method: The OpenAI team ran a suite of 63 differe...
8b335fd7-e874-44ab-8895-33c39386a458
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Applications are open for the MIRI Summer Fellows Program! CFAR and MIRI are running our fifth annual MIRI Summer Fellows Program (MSFP) in the San Francisco Bay Area from August 9 to August 24, 2019. MSFP is an extended retreat for mathematicians and programmers with a serious interest in making technical progress o...
1f7718e1-736e-4b16-a21e-ff2eb04c9de4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Progress links and tweets, 2023-02-15 The Progress Forum * AMA: Matt Clancy, Open Philanthropy * The Rise of Steel - Part I, by Brian Potter Opportunities * Sloan Foundation offering $75k–250k grants for history of science, technology, economics, and social science (via @SloanFoundation and @epistemographer) * O...
24e2d9e8-e3bd-4696-ad7f-42e9dc2b95b9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Synthetic Restrictions Introduction As a child, I have read many stories, delving into everything from geography to Spanish literature, crime novels, and global history books. Each day, before or after school, I'd go to the local library, eagerly choosing the books that would be my companions for the week. A few year...
2de0ca9e-53af-4102-8725-4d3d80aecc5b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
HCH and Adversarial Questions *This is a paper I wrote as part of a PhD program in philosophy, in trying to learn more about and pivot towards alignment research.  In it, I mostly aimed to build up and distill my knowledge of IDA.* *Special thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo for his mentorship on this, and to Michael Brownst...
819d1865-fa70-488f-a4b4-e42e0143ae0e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup Interest Probe: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois I'm going to be starting graduate school in Urbana-Champaign this fall, and want to know if there are LessWrongers there (or like me, going to be there) who want to hold some meetups. Google shows me that someone else tried asking the same thing last year and met with ...
026ac1a3-f82c-4347-93f6-8ae0c2663d37
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Caelum est Conterrens: I frankly don't see how this is a horror story So Eliezer said in his March 1st HPMOR progress report: > I recommend the recursive fanfic “Friendship is Optimal: Caelum est Conterrens” (Heaven Is Terrifying).  This is the first and only effective horror novel I have ever read, since unlike Love...
4572c7b7-dfcb-4e21-8e70-fb392231f825
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Where I agree and disagree with Eliezer (*Partially in response to*[*AGI Ruin: A list of Lethalities*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities). *Written in the same rambling style. Not exhaustive.*) ### Agreements 1. Powerful AI systems have a good chance of deliberately and...
9db43633-4b8e-4f11-915c-2191d040a1a3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Automatically finding feature vectors in the OV circuits of Transformers without using probing Let's say that you're working to understand how a given large language model computes its output on a certain task. You might be curious about the following questions: * What are some linear feature vectors that are respons...
b45b2920-b56a-479c-a914-48d13f2b0bbf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Slowing AI: Foundations Variables "Slowing AI" is not monolithic. Many interventions have relevant side effects, positive or negative. There are many considerations, desiderata, and goals adjacent to slowing AI, and different interventions realize them to different degrees. This section is a list and discussion of var...
ff758514-f335-4edb-904d-f7f955a338da
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy Eliezer's anti-philosophy post Against Modal Logics was pretty controversial, while my recent pro-philosophy (by LW standards) post and my list of useful mainstream philosophy contributions were massively up-voted. This suggests a sign...